Commissions meet over polling site question
By Suzanne Werre, BHG News Service
On Monday night, when the Underwood City Commission was looking for someone to blame for the fact that Underwood isn’t going to have a polling site for the upcoming election in June, county auditor Les Korgel stepped up to take the blame, saying he should have made sure he sent notices out to each of the cities that had been originally told it would have a polling site, but following a decision by the county commission, now wouldn’t. Korgel, however, was joined in the “blame-taking” by the commissioners, who also apologized. Commissioners Julie Hudson-Schenfisch, Steve Lee and Ron Krebsbach, who were all in attendance, apologized to the commission for not contacting the commissioners about the change in the number of polling sites, and locations of them, before they read about it in a local paper. City commissioner Jay Snyder said he was disappointed about not having a polling site, but he was more upset that he found out about it by reading it in the paper – that the city commissioners weren’t notified in person right away about the decision. “There’s no reason the (county) commissioners couldn’t have called the city commissioners . . . at least we would have known about it before we read it in the paper,” said Snyder. Hudson-Schenfisch, who as 1st district representative, represents Underwood on the county commission, apologized for the oversight in not notifying the city commissioners of the change, agreeing that, yes, she should have notified them. “I don’t like to find out things in the paper either.” In the end, the county commissioners agreed it was a decision that had to be made, and getting the information out should have been handled better.
